Emily Saunders was in the hospital for some serious operation, would be there for weeks; Ella was abroad. Susan felt as if her little glimpse of their world and Peter"s had been a curious dream.
Billy played a brother"s part toward her now, always ready to take her about with him when he was free, and quite the only person who could spur her to anything like her old vigorous interest in life. They went very often to the Carrolls, and there, in the shabby old sitting-room, Susan felt happier than she did anywhere else. Everybody loved her, loved to have her there, and although they knew, and she knew that they knew, that something had gone very wrong with her, n.o.body asked questions, and Susan felt herself safe and sheltered. There was a shout of joy when she came in with Phil and Jo from the ferryboat. "Mother!
here"s Sue!" Betsey would follow the older girls upstairs to chatter while they washed their hands and brushed their hair, and, going down again, Susan would get the motherly kiss that followed Jo"s. Later, when the lamp was lit, while Betsey and Jim wrangled amicably over their game, and Philip and Jo toiled with piano and violin, Susan sat next to Mrs. Carroll, and while they sewed, or between s.n.a.t.c.hes of reading, they had long, and to the girl at least, memorable talks.
It was all sweet and wholesome and happy. Susan used to wonder just what made this house different from all other houses, and why she liked to come here so much, to eat the simplest of meals, to wash dishes and brush floors, to rise in the early morning and cross the bay before the time she usually came downstairs at home. Of course, they loved her, they laughed at her jokes, they wanted this thing repeated and that repeated, they never said good-by to her without begging her to come again and thought no special occasion complete without her. That affected her, perhaps. Or perhaps the Carrolls were a little nicer than most people; when Susan reached this point in her thoughts she never failed to regret the loss of their money and position. If they had done this in spite of poverty and obscurity, what MIGHTN"T they have done with half a chance!
In one of the lamplight talks Peter was mentioned, in connection with the patent window-washer, and Susan learned for the first time that he really had been instrumental in selling the patent for Mrs. Carroll for the astonishing sum of five hundred dollars!
"I BEGGED him to tell me if that wasn"t partly from the washer and partly from Peter Coleman," smiled Mrs. Carroll, "and he gave me his word of honor that he had really sold it for that! So--there went my doctor"s bill, and a comfortable margin in the bank!"
She admitted Susan into the secret of all her little economies; the roast that, cleverly alternated with one or two small meats, was served from Sunday until Sat.u.r.day night, and no one any the worse! Susan began to watch the game that Mrs. Carroll made of her cooking; filling soups for the night that the meat was short, no sweet when the garden supplied a salad, or when Susan herself brought over a box of candy.
She grew to love the labor that lay behind the touch of the thin, darned linen, the windows that shone with soapsuds, the crisp snowy ruffles of curtains and beds. She and Betts liked to keep the house vases filled with what they could find in the storm-battered garden, lifted the flattened chrysanthemums with reverent fingers, hunted out the wet violets. Susan abandoned her old idea of the enviable life of a lonely orphan, and began to long for a sister, a tumble-headed brother, for a mother above all. She loved to be included by the young Carrolls when they protested, "Just ourselves, Mother, n.o.body but the family!"
and if Phil or Jimmy came to her when a coat-b.u.t.ton was loose or a sleeve-lining needed a st.i.tch, she was quite pathetically touched. She loved the constant happy noise and confusion in the house, Phil and Billy Oliver tussling in the stair-closet among the overshoes, Betts trilling over her bed-making, Mrs. Carroll and Jim replanting primroses with great calling and conference, and she and Josephine talking, as they swept the porches, as if they had never had a chance to talk before.
Sometimes, walking at Anna"s side to the beach on Sunday, a certain peace and content crept into Susan"s heart, and the deep ache lifted like a curtain, and seemed to show a saner, wider, sweeter region beyond. Sometimes, tramping the wet hills, her whole being thrilled to some new note, Susan could think serenely of the future, could even be glad of all the past. It was as if Life, into whose cold, stern face she had been staring wistfully, had softened to the glimmer of a smile, had laid a hand, so lately used to strike, upon her shoulder in token of good-fellowship.
With the good salt air in their faces, and the gray March sky pressing close above the silent circle of the hills about them, she and Anna walked many a bracing, tiring mile. Now and then they turned and smiled at each other, both young faces brightening.
"Noisy, aren"t we, Sue?"
"Well, the others are making noise enough!"
Poverty stopped them at every turn, these Carrolls. Susan saw it perhaps more clearly than they did. A hundred delightful and hospitable plans came into Mrs. Carroll"s mind, only to be dismissed because of the expense involved. She would have liked to entertain, to keep her pretty daughters becomingly and richly dressed; she confided to Susan rather wistfully, that she was sorry not to be able to end the evenings with little chafing-dish suppers; "that sort of thing makes home so attractive to growing boys." Susan knew what Anna"s own personal grievance was. "These are the best years of my life," Anna said, bitterly, one night, "and every cent of spending money I have is the fifty dollars a year the hospital pays. And even out of that they take breakage, in the laboratory or the wards!" Josephine made no secret of her detestation of their necessary economies.
"Did you know I was asked to the Juniors this year?" she said to Susan one night.
"The Juniors! You weren"t!" Susan echoed incredulously. For the "Junior Cotillion" was quite the most exclusive and desirable of the city"s winter dances for the younger set.
"Oh, yes, I was. Mrs. Wallace probably did it," Josephine a.s.sured her, sighing. "They asked Anna last year," she said bitterly, "and I suppose next year they"ll ask Betts, and then perhaps they"ll stop."
"Oh, but Jo-why couldn"t you go! When so many girls are just CRAZY to be asked!"
"Money," Josephine answered briefly.
"But not much!" Susan lamented. The "Juniors" were not to be estimated in mere money.
"Twenty-five for the ticket, and ten for the chaperone, and a gown, of course, and slippers and a wrap--Mother felt badly about it," Josephine said composedly. And suddenly she burst into tears, and threw herself down on the bed. "Don"t let Mother hear, and don"t think I"m an idiot!"
she sobbed, as Susan came to kneel beside her and comfort her, "but--but I hate so to drudge away day after day, when I know I could be having GORGEOUS times, and making friends---!"
Betts" troubles were more simple in that they were indefinite. Betts wanted to do everything, regardless of cost, suitability or season, and was quite as cross over the fact that they could not go camping in the Humboldt woods in midwinter, as she was at having to give up her ideas of a new hat or a theater trip. And the boys never complained specifically of poverty. Philip, won by deep plotting that he could not see to settle down quietly at home after dinner, was the gayest and best of company, and Jim"s only allusions to a golden future were made when he rubbed his affectionate little rough head against his mother, pony-fashion, and promised her every luxury in the world as soon as he "got started."
When Peter Coleman returned from the Orient, early in April, all the newspapers chronicled the fact that a large number of intimate friends met him at the dock. He was instantly swept into the social currents again; dinners everywhere were given for Mr. Coleman, box-parties and house-parties followed one another, the club claimed him, and the approaching opening of the season found him giving special attention to his yacht. Small wonder that Hunter, Baxter & Hunter"s caught only occasional glimpses of him. Susan, somberly pursuing his name from paper to paper, felt that she was beginning to dislike him. She managed never to catch his eye, when he was in Mr. Brauer"s office, and took great pains not to meet him.
However, in the lingering sweet twilight of a certain soft spring evening, when she had left the office, and was beginning the long walk home, she heard sudden steps behind her, and turned to see Peter.
"Aren"t you the little seven-leagued booter! Wait a minute, Susan!
C"est moi! How are you?"
"How do you do, Peter?" Susan said pleasantly and evenly. She put her hand in the big gloved hand, and raised her eyes to the smiling eyes.
"What car are you making for?" he asked, falling in step.
"I"m walking," Susan said. "Too nice to ride this evening."
"You"re right," he said, laughing. "I wish I hadn"t a date, I"d like nothing better than to walk it, too! However, I can go a block or two."
He walked with her to Montgomery Street, and they talked of j.a.pan and the Carrolls and of Emily Saunders. Then Peter said he must catch a California Street car, and they shook hands again and parted.
It all seemed rather flat. Susan felt as if the little episode did not belong in the stormy history of their friendship at all, or as if she were long dead and were watching her earthly self from a distance with wise and weary eyes. What should she be feeling now? What would a stronger woman have done? Given him the cut direct, perhaps, or forced the situation to a point when something dramatic--satisfying--must follow.
"I am weak," said Susan ashamedly to herself; "I was afraid he would think I cared,--would see that I cared!" And she walked on busy with self-contemptuous and humiliated thoughts. She had made it easy for him to take advantage of her. She had a.s.sumed for his convenience that she had suffered no more than he through their parting, and that all was again serene and pleasant between them. After to-night"s casual, friendly conversation, no radical att.i.tude would be possible on her part; he could congratulate himself that he still retained Susan"s friendship, and could be careful--she knew he would be careful!--never to go too far again.
Susan"s estimate of Peter Coleman was no longer a particularly idealized one. But she had long ago come to the conclusion that his faults were the faults of his type and his cla.s.s, excusable and understandable now, and to be easily conquered when a great emotion should sweep him once and for all away from the thought of himself. As he was absorbed in the thought of his own comfort, so, she knew, he could become absorbed in the thought of what was due his wife, the wider viewpoint would quickly become second nature with him; young Mrs.
Peter Coleman would be among the most indulged and carefully considered of women. He would be as anxious that the relationship between his wife and himself should be harmonious and happy, as he was now to feel when he met her that he had no reason to avoid or to dread meeting Miss Susan Brown.
If Susan would have preferred a little different att.i.tude on his part, she could find no fault with this one. She had for so many months thought of Peter as the personification of all that she desired in life that she could not readily dismiss him as unworthy. Was he not still sweet and big and clean, rich and handsome and popular, socially prominent and suitable in age and faith and nationality?
Susan had often heard her aunt and her aunt"s friends remark that life was more dramatic than any book, and that their own lives on the stage would eclipse in sensational quality any play ever presented. But, for herself, life seemed deplorably, maddeningly undramatic. In any book, in any play, the situation between her and Peter must have been heightened to a definite crisis long before this. The mildest of little ingenues, as she came across a dimly lighted stage, in demure white and silver, could have handled this situation far more skillfully than Susan did; the most youthful of heroines would have met Peter to some purpose,--while surrounded by other admirers at a dance, or while galloping across a moor on her spirited pony.
What would either of these ladies have done, she wondered, at meeting the offender when he appeared particularly well-groomed, prosperous and happy, while she herself was tired from a long office day, conscious of shabby gloves, of a shapeless winter hat? What could she do, except appear friendly and responsive? Susan consoled herself with the thought that her only alternative, an icy repulse of his friendly advances, would have either convinced him that she was too entirely common and childish to be worth another thought, or would have amused him hugely.
She could fancy him telling his friends of his experience of the cut direct from a little girl in Front Office,--no names named--and hear him saying that "he loved it--he was crazy about it!"
"You believe in the law of compensation, don"t you, Aunt Jo?" asked Susan, on a wonderful April afternoon, when she had gone straight from the office to Sausalito. The two women were in the Carroll kitchen, Susan sitting at one end of the table, her thoughtful face propped in her hands, Mrs. Carroll busy making ginger cakes,--cutting out the flat little circles with an inverted wine-gla.s.s, transferring them to the pans with the tip of her flat knife, rolling the smooth dough, and spilling the hot cakes, as they came back from the oven, into a deep tin strainer to cool. Susan liked to watch her doing this, liked the pretty precision of every movement, the brisk yet unhurried repet.i.tion of events, her strong clever hands, the absorbed expression of her face, her fine, broad figure hidden by a stiffly-starched gown of faded blue cotton and a stiff white ap.r.o.n.
Beyond the open window an exquisite day dropped to its close. It was the time of fruit-blossoms and feathery acacia, languid, perfumed breezes, lengthening twilights, opening roses and swaying plumes of lilac. Sausalito was like a little park, every garden ran over with sweetness and color, every walk was fringed with flowers, and hedged with the new green of young trees and blossoming hedges. Susan felt a delicious relaxation run through her blood; winter seemed really routed; to-day for the first time one could confidently prophesy that there would be summer presently, thin gowns and ocean bathing and splendid moons.
"Yes, I believe in the law of compensation, to a great extent," the older woman answered thoughtfully, "or perhaps I should call it the law of solution. I truly believe that to every one of us on this earth is given the materials for a useful and a happy life; some people use them and some don"t. But the chance is given alike."
"Useful, yes," Susan conceded, "but usefulness isn"t happiness."
"Isn"t it? I really think it is."
"Oh, Aunt Jo," the girl burst out impatiently, "I don"t mean for saints! I dare say there ARE some girls who wouldn"t mind being poor and shabby and lonesome and living in a boarding-house, and who would be glad they weren"t hump-backed, or blind, or Siberian prisoners! But you CAN"T say you think that a girl in my position has had a fair start with a girl who is just as young, and rich and pretty and clever, and has a father and mother and everything else in the world! And if you do say so," pursued Susan, with feeling, "you certainly can"t MEAN so---"
"But wait a minute, Sue! What girl, for instance?"
"Oh, thousands of girls!" Susan said, vaguely. "Emily Saunders, Alice Chauncey---"
"Emily Saunders! SUSAN! In the hospital for an operation every other month or two!" Mrs. Carroll reminded her.
"Well, but---" Susan said eagerly. "She isn"t really ill. She just likes the excitement and having them fuss over her. She loves the hospital."
"Still, I wouldn"t envy anyone whose home life wasn"t preferable to the hospital, Sue."
"Well, Emily is queer, Aunt Jo. But in her place I wouldn"t necessarily be queer."
"At the same time, considering her brother Kenneth"s rather checkered career, and the fact that her big sister neglects and ignores her, and that her health is really very delicate, I don"t consider Emily a happy choice for your argument, Sue."
"Well, there"s Peggy Brock. She"s a perfect beauty---"